Heuristic Approach for Fund Allocation in Complex Rehabilitation Programs

Pavements are important assets to the safety and serviceability of road networks. Due to their fast deterioration and stringent municipal budgets, allocating the limited rehabilitation funds becomes a complex task. In this paper, an efficient heuristic approach for fund allocation has been introduced. After prioritizing pavements based on different criteria, such as AADT, pavement IRI, and road type, the proposed heuristic process combines three procedures for determining required amount of funding and the best pavement treatments to use during the planning horizon. To automate the process, it has been programmed within a simplified pavement management system (PMS) for testing and validation on a case study of more than 1200 pavements. Based on the results of various experiments, the proposed method allocated the limited rehabilitation funds efficiently, and selected the most appropriate treatments to use. This method is simple and logical, allows multiple what-if scenarios, and can be used on variety of asset types to improve infrastructure fund allocation.